Procedural Knowledge and How it Affects User Experience

Innovation is a dangerous word in marketing lingo. Someone recently told me, “Let’s create an innovative design that goes beyond what people expect and surprises them.” I hesitated and asked, “Why?”

The answer this person gave is one that I’ve heard countless times while talking about user experience, web design, and user journeys. They wanted their online experience to be unique and edgy. They strived to present users a spectacle and make a lasting imprint on their minds.

In other words, they wanted to forfeit the users’ procedural knowledge and force them to learn an entirely new experience with the hope they liked it better.

Humans are habitual creatures who resist change. Forcing “innovation” on us — for the sake of being different — and asking us to abandon what we’re used to is often a bad idea.

What Is Procedural Knowledge?

Procedural knowledge is the moment you learn how to do something by experiencing it firsthand.

Do you remember the first time you learned to parallel park? Perhaps you were like me and watched YouTube videos to learn the fundamentals and then watched somebody show you parallel parking in person.

Does absorbing this knowledge mean I instantly knew how to parallel park? No, I only understood the concept. This comprehension is known as declarative knowledge.

I gained procedural knowledge after acting on my declarative knowledge by working through the process of parallel parking myself.

Why Procedural Knowledge Is Crucial in UX

Here are several “universal” tasks I imagine you naturally do without active thinking.

Navigate to a website’s home page without seeing a “home” navigation option

Type on a QWERTY keyboard without looking at the keys

Copy-paste text into a document

Perform an online search without being on Google’s homepage

Click on a hyperlink to find related content

You can easily perform these tasks now because you’ve completed these actions at least once before and the requirements to repeat the tasks haven’t changed.

Now, imagine you’re browsing a website and you click on a company’s logo to return to the homepage. But clicking the logo doesn’t take you anywhere and the website doesn’t have a “home” navigation label either. How do you get back?

This example is a moment of cognitive friction, and the general rule of thumb is that friction is bad for your users.

Importantly, friction is not the same thing as confusion per se, although they may go hand-in-hand. Instead, friction pushes users to slow down, figure out the task at hand, resolve dissonance, etc. And as a byproduct it takes them to a mental state where they’ll think harder about whether they should convert at all.

Friction can be a good thing if you use it wisely. But friction that ignores procedural knowledge causes confused and frustrated users who may abandon the task and choose a more intuitive competitor.

Remember, the easier the task, the happier we are to perform it. So if you must change your user experience, then investigate ways you can put procedural knowledge to better use. Consider how to reveal redundancies and simplify how many steps a user must perform in a task and use universal, easy-to-recognize UI patterns. Change can be good, so long as it makes the user’s life better.

Travis is a Content Strategist at Portent who migrated to digital marketing after working in journalism. His byline includes The Guardian, New York Magazine, Slate Magazine, and more. He specializes in combining a refined user experience with exceptional, authentic storytelling and meaningful content.